Clad in a red keffiyeh, Megha Vemuri, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s class of 2025, addressed graduates at the school’s commencement on Thursday.
“You showed the world that MIT wants a free Palestine,” she said.
“It is no secret that at this time, academic institutions across the country are shrouded in a dark cloud of uncertainty,” she said. “The question of what will happen next echoes in our minds, and there is a lot of fear in many of our hearts.”
Vemuri told graduates, to some applause, that “last spring, MIT’s undergraduate body and graduate student union voted overwhelmingly to cut ties with the genocidal Israeli military.”
“You called for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, and you stood in solidarity with the pro-Palestine activists on campus. You faced threats, intimidation and suppression coming from all directions, especially your own university officials, but you prevailed,” she said. “Because the MIT community that I know would never tolerate a genocide.”
As she and her peers graduate, “there are no universities left in Gaza. We are watching Israel try to wipe Palestine off the face of the earth, and it is a shame that MIT is a part of it,” the student said.
“The Israeli occupation forces are the only foreign military that MIT has research ties with,” she said. “This means that Israel’s assault on the Palestinian people is not only aided and abetted by our country, but our school.”
“As scientists, engineers, academics and leaders, we have a commitment to support life, support aid efforts and call for an arms embargo, and keep demanding now as alumni that MIT cuts the ties,” she said.
After telling students to turn their rings around so the MIT emblem faces outward, the student said that the school “is directly complicit in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, and so we carry with us the obligation to do everything we can to stop it.”
Sally Kornbluth, the MIT president who has retained her job unlike the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, who testified alongside her in December 2023 at a House Committee on Education and the Workforce hearing on Jew-hatred, spoke following Vemuri.
“OK, listen, folks. At MIT, we value freedom of expression,” she said, without pushing back on the “genocide” accusation against the Jewish state. “But today’s about the graduates, so it’s time for me to charge you all. So good afternoon, everyone.”
“Just throw academia in the garbage,” wrote Vickie Paladino, a Republican member of the New York City Council who represents part of Queens.
“It’s time to start from scratch,” she stated. “There’s literally nothing left to lose at this point. None of these people deserve the status, prestige or authority that comes with an elite credential.”
Retsef Levi, a professor of operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management who notes in his bio that he served in the Israel Defense Forces for nearly 12 years, wrote, “that MIT trains woke minds that fail to see the only genocidal entity in Gaza is Hamas is known.”
“But to ignore warnings and allow the class president to deliver hateful and dividing speech with no response from President Kornbluth, who followed, shows the gravity of the situation,” Levi stated. “The president that failed to recognize that calling for genocide is harassment failed once again to show moral compass and clarity.”
“MIT deserves a better leader,” he said.
Talia Khan, a mechanical engineering graduate student at MIT who has testified before the House education panel, wrote that “on what should’ve been a unifying day at MIT, president Sally Kornbluth let a commencement speaker hijack the stage to demonize Israel.”
“Nearly two years of antisemitic hostility, and still Jewish students get silence while bigotry gets a mic. Shameful,” she wrote.
When someone asked her why Jewish graduates and their families at the graduation didn’t heckle the speaker, Khan wrote that “my friends were scared and in shock. They said they were almost to tears at their own graduation.”
This JNS.org report was republished with permission from Jewish News Syndicate.
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